Beside Herself

"Joe Pintauro's BESIDE HERSELF...is a real uplifter....

Mary Candee is a woman whose life has not turned out the way she imagined.... Pintauro's heroine is, in short, a representation of Unfulfilled Womanhood, and if she...had been conceived by a less subtle, elegant-minded playwright, she would probably be a clich ....

...Three characters materialize--apparitions, obviously--and enter into lively conversation...you realize that these females are not creations of the heroine's imagination, but earlier versions of herself....

...its juxtaposition of the romantic and the banal...makes Pintauro's play alternately lovely and piquant....

Instead of watching a character relive past events (Willy Loman style), we see characters from the past taking an unnatural interest in what is going on in the present. Or else we're watching her younger selves watch the heroine go through the motions of her life. It's funny and poignant, and one of the best uses I've seen of the device of representing the changing of the divided self by more than one actor. Like the ghosts in...OUR TOWN, each of the apparitions knows only her part of what has happened in the world and in the heroine's life. (The little girl doesn't know that the Second World War is over; the young girl doesn't know whom the heroine wound up marrying; the woman in violet doesn't know that the heroine's husband died.) The fact that each can understand only what she could be expected to furnishes occasions for drama and passion. There's a generosity toward actors in the way Pintauro has given each of the apparitions a thematic and psychological function...."

Mimi Kramer, The New Yorker